In this mailing: Giulio Meotti: "If You Do Not Have Free Speech You Are Not Free" Amir Taheri: America is Back: What Did it Do? "If You Do Not Have Free Speech You Are Not Free" Refugees from Communism Horrified at America by Giulio Meotti  •  July 18, 2021 at 5:00 am       "There was no free speech, you could not share values or thoughts if they were not Mao's values and thoughts...." — Lei Zhang, Carolina Journal, July 2, 2021. "You have people who now say, 'Math is white supremacy,' or that calculus was invented by this man of this race so it is oppression. This is stupid". — Lei Zhang, Carolina Journal, July 2, 2021. "Most of this crap originated on US campuses. I was at Stanford in the mid-1980s and watched with amazement how political correctness erupted. I had always blamed people like Stalin or Beria for censorship, but now I realized that many intellectuals want it too! Such people will always want censorship; they will always want to be oppressors because they always pretend to be oppressed". — Vladimir Bukovsky. "When they tell kids, kindergarten, 5, 6 years old, that they are bad because they are in this race, or they are oppressed if they are in this group, and children cannot disagree, this is very bad because they cannot change their skin color or where they are from. They did not choose to be this race or that race, they are Americans, we are all Americans, and if we are fighting each other over this ideology, I agree with that when people say that this will destroy America. This is what happened under Mao and the Cultural Revolution....If you disagree or say something different they punish you.... You have no free thought". — Lei Zhang, Carolina Journal, July 2, 2021. "As a community, we face an important choice. We can succumb to extreme left ideology and spend the rest of our lives ghost-chasing and witch-hunting, rewriting history, politicizing science, redefining elements of language, and turning STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) education into a farce. Or we can uphold a key principle of democratic society—the free and uncensored exchange of ideas...." — Anna Krylov, who was born in the Soviet Union, and is now a Professor of Chemistry at the University of California, The Journal of Physical Chemistry, June 10, 2021. Today, those who fled from Communist regimes see -- most dangerously -- the same censorship and totalitarian suppression repeated in America's democracy. They know better than we do what freedom of thought means, and the price we must pay to defend it. Garry Kasparov, the former World Chess Champion from Russia, noted the "self-destructive spiral of the West": it damages its cultural heritage instead of defending it. Regarding the weakness of Western leaders, Kasparov told Le Figaro: "Where are the de Gaulles and the Churchills? I see a crowd of Chamberlain and Daladier.... I was shocked to see the rush to debunk historical figures judged by our current criteria. The West should be proud of them instead of hating itself". (Photo by Mark Wilson/Getty Images) Today in America there is a new generation of exiles from Communist regimes fighting a new political correctness, called wokeism. Czeslaw Milosz, before he was a Nobel laureate for Literature and author of The Captive Mind, fought two totalitarianisms in his native country, Poland: first Nazism, then Communism, which took its place. In 1945, after joining the Polish diplomatic service, Milosz was appointed cultural attaché to the embassy in New York, where he served until being recalled in 1950. In 1951, he defected to France. Continue Reading Article America is Back: What Did it Do? by Amir Taheri  •  July 18, 2021 at 4:00 am       ....Biden's policies have proved to be little more than confused and at times contradictory gestures. A Washington Post opinion columnist claimed that "Biden wiped the smirk off Putin's face." In reality, however, Putin left the meeting with a much broader naughty-boy smile. Biden... cancelled Trump's veto on the controversial Russian gas trunk-pipeline to Germany. He did something even more amazing; he presented a list of 16 critical infrastructure "entities" in the US which he wanted Putin not to target in cyber-attacks, or face unspecified "consequences". Does this mean that, as long as he spares those highly sensitive targets, Putin would have a free hand in doing cyber mischief across the US? The smirking Putin returned home to intensify pressure on Ukraine, boost the Belarusian despot Viktor Lukashenko, unveil the largest nuclear submarine in history and even threaten to sink a British warship in Ukrainian waters. With one-eighth of his tenure over, Biden has not yet revealed his strategy for dealing with either Russia or China. One place "America is back" has taken place is in talks in Vienna about the ill-conceived "nuclear deal" with the Islamic Republic concocted by President Barack Obama and advertised as the greatest part of his legacy in foreign policy terms. The smirking Russian President Vladimir Putin returned home from his meeting with US President Joe Biden to intensify pressure on Ukraine, boost the Belarusian despot Viktor Lukashenko, unveil the largest nuclear submarine in history and even threaten to sink a British warship in Ukrainian waters. Pictured: Biden and Putin meet Geneva on June 16, 2021. (Photo by Denis Balibouse/Pool/AFP via Getty Images) A presidential term in the US could be studied in eight segments of six months each, in which the man in the White House must negotiate political minefields as he tries to implement his program or, at least, pretends to be doing so. Experience shows that a president is most effective in the first three of the six-month segments, as in the fourth he faces mid-term congressional elections that often require dicey changes of trajectory. The fifth and sixth segments often amount to a liminal challenge, depending on the incumbent's ability to mobilize support for his vision, provided he has one. The seventh and last segments are, of course dominated by the next presidential election and the strategy needed for winning a second term. Joe Biden has already spent the first of his eight segments. And the result, at least as far as foreign policy is concerned, is far from brilliant, to say the least. Continue Reading Article